The present disclosure relates to a cleaning device including a polishing roller that polishes, by using toner, the surface of a rotation body such as an image carrier, and to an image forming apparatus.
In an electrophotographic image forming apparatus such as a copier, an electrostatic latent image is formed on the surface of an image carrier, such as a photoconductor drum, that has been charged by a charging device. The electrostatic latent image formed on the surface of the image carrier is developed with toner, and the developed toner image is transferred onto an transfer object such as a paper sheet, so that an image is formed.
Here, a part of the toner may not be transferred to the transfer object and may remain on the surface of the image carrier. In addition, when a charging device charges the image carrier, an electric discharge is generated, and thereby discharge products may be generated and adhere to the surface of the image carrier. These adhering substances on the surface of the image carrier may hinder subsequent image formation and degrade image quality. As a result, in this type of image forming apparatus, a cleaning device is provided to remove the adhering substances from the surface of the image carrier. For example, there is known a configuration including: a cleaning member configured to remove toner from the surface of the image carrier; a polishing roller configured to polish the surface of the image carrier in the state where the removed toner has adhered to the surface of the polishing roller; and a layer thickness restricting member configured to restrict a layer thickness of the toner that has adhered to a surface of the polishing roller.